The present invention relates generally to user interface widgets, and more particularly to global filtering of widgets across heterogeneous datasets.
Computer widgets (commonly called widgets) are interactive virtual tools that provide single-purpose services, such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather, the time, a calendar, a dictionary, a map program, a calculator, photo viewers, or even a language translator, among other things. Widgets can provide or augment the graphical shell. In some instances widgets can intercommunicate and show related metrics.
A widget can represent parts of a graphical user interface (GUI), which the user can use to interact with the program to which the GUI belongs to. Widgets may be implemented like subroutines. Widget toolkits and software frameworks contain them in software libraries so that programmers can use them to build GUIs for their programs.